Hatch, Nathan O. The democratization of American Christianity. Yale University Press, 1989.

            Hatch offers a historically contextualized assessment of how America was Christianized through grassroots religious movements, each of which employed audience-centered communications to multiply their converts and engage their congregations. Between the five diverse movements covered in this book (Christians, Methodists, Baptists, black churches and Mormons), there was a shared “ethic of unrelenting toil, a passion for expansion, a hostility to orthodox belief and style, a zeal for religious reconstruction, and a systematic plan to realize their ideals” (4). The proceeding chapters seem to focus thoroughly on all except for the last of these features. Early on in the first chapter, Hatch mentions how American religion grew out of an “intellectually respectable and institutionally cohesive” traditions (5), but overwhelmingly transformed into a multiplicity of populist movements that aimed to convert as many people as possible at the expense of, or in opposition to, these previous traditions. However, this book only remains comparative between the movements he finds commonalities between and does not bring much discussion of more orthodox churches into the picture. Throughout the book, he cites many instances of general institutional structures and clerical hierarchies without diving too deep into the specifics. This move is welcomed, given these movements appear to have grown out of wholesale rejections of orthodoxies on anti-intellectual, anti-elite, and anti-clerical appeals.

            While the various Christian movements developed alongside democratic governance in America’s first half-century, Hatch aligns them more with the emerging popular culture. Specifically, it focuses on a multiplicity of individual church leaders that used audience-centered appeals, colloquial language, and fresh rhetorical modes (folk music, humor, and incendiary attacks) to persuade converts into their unique renditions of Christianity. In the process, they capitalized on the burgeoning affordance of print by disseminating newspapers, pamphlets, and hymns; poached from different (and sometimes contradictory) epistemologies and Christian exegeses; and employed entertainment in their sermons. By rejecting rigid doctrines and traditional homiletic forms, blurring the lines between clergy and laity, and keeping the message centered on the immediate audience, Christianity increasingly became a free-market enterprise that was accessible to all (sexes, races, levels of education, etc.).

            I made several key takeaways from this book. Firstly, the splintering of American Christianity was mainly fueled by opposition to orthodoxy and other emerging Christianites, however similar. Second, Hatch’s analysis is historical and secular – it read as a mostly neutral account of these movements development in the era following the Revolution. He makes several rhetorical choices that make him sound indifferent, and at times unfavorable, to the movements and their theological implications. Third, Hatch offers a historically rooted cultural study with a focus on rhetoric (rhetorical historiography). Overall, I thought the book was well organized for how many separate movements and how much archival material he covered. The Context and Audience sections were the most to-the-point. While the study appears to be very carefully executed and narrativized, at times it was a bit pedantic and sometimes focused on figures for so few passages that it didn’t seem to add much to the overall argument. I was left wondering what Hatch considers to be popular culture – a term that he uses throughout, seems key to the study, but is never clearly defined. This was a worthwhile read that helped me contextualize the roots of evangelical anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism.